Ringing in the Olympics: Hoop Dreams

My affection for the Barcelona Games has already been stated, and the passing of time has done little to diminish its status in my affections. For me, of the five stagings I have to choose from, it ranks a very close second to Sydney.

I think it was a summer Sunday evening (when church always seemed to take something of a backseat for a couple of months) that we were sat as a family in front of the day’s highlights show and I first came across these boys: The Dream Team. A remarkable basketball team in themselves, except that I had never seen professional basketball played in my life, let alone with such gusto. Over the course of the two weeks, Jordan, Johnson, Pippen et al were to slam-dunk and alley-oop their way into my affections like few other sporting outfits since.

I’m well aware that a fair few Americans still consider 1992, and its opening of the floodgates for subsequent NBA-festooned US teams, to have been something of an insult to amateur hoops and the Olympic ethos in general. An important debate, for sure, but one I couldn’t possibly have grasped as a goggle-eyed 9-year-old. The biggest disappointment as far as I was concerned was to come in later years, as I learned that the standard they set was, indeed, unreachable. Basketball was rarely, if ever, to re-surface on my radar as a serious interest, but for my contemporaries and I, the NBA boom that Barcelona undoubtedly spearheaded did leave one important legacy: NBA Jam on the Super Nintendo, an imperious sports simulation! BOOM shack-a-lack!